Snowman
by Rayless Night
Summary: There was nothing about a snowman.


_Disclaimer: __Persona IV__ is the property of Atlus. Rating is for language. This fic was inspired by the song "Winter" by Tori Amos, though, given its focus on Naoto's gender identity, it doesn't follow the song point by point.  
_

* * *

**Snowman**

She'd meant it as an apology, but as she watched her granddaughter walk numbly beside her, Yasuko wondered if offering to take her on a stroll had only made things worse. The very lining of her body seemed to tighten at the thought. _No. We're all Nao-chan has_. She'd thought that years ago - _we're all Kei-chan has_ - when she'd divorced her husband and tried to decide how best to divide their son's life between them. And she'd thought it again, two months ago when she learned that Keitaro had died in a car accident and left his five-year-old daughter behind.

The apology formed on her lips, then she took a quick breath of frosty air and tried to stabilize herself. She hadn't seen the Shirogane estate for nearly a decade, and she'd forgotten its winter beauty. The tree-lined avenues, usually so dark and secretive, felt open and crackling, alert as the sun broke over the icy surfaces. Snow soughed and slid under their boots, and she firmed her grip on Naoto's hand. Couldn't let the poor baby slip, she'd been through so much. She had so much to cry over, she'd only been trying to help -

Yasuko shook her head, black, gray-threaded hair swinging against her jaw. She _had_ only been trying to help. It _should_ have helped. She'd painstakingly searched for the right doll to console Naoto with, something blond so she wouldn't be reminded of her dead mother. She finally found it, a gold-haired beauty with flexible limbs. When her left hand was squeezed, she sang out one of three hundred ready sayings, her voice clear and sweet.

Naoto, usually so cool to Yasuko's overtures, had been delighted. She'd stared at the doll, forehead puckered with concentration, then squeezed the left hand. When the doll spoke, Naoto's eyes rounded, she'd smiled and run off to her room, and Yasuko had given her ex-husband a smug smile of her own. He always said she didn't understand Naoto. She always said he only understood boys.

"Nao-chan," Yasuko said, her voice rasping on the dry air, the tightness of her throat. Naoto glanced quickly up, the edges of her eyes red from crying and the cold outdoors. Her nose was pink, running, and Yasuko would've reached down and wiped it on her own finger expect that the child would flinch. "Nao-chan, I'm-" _I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to shout at you._ Naoto was still looking at her, waiting, and her small fingers were tense inside Yasuko's. _I didn't think I'd find you with the doll pulled open, the pieces everywhere. I only - I just..._

After she'd shouted, after Naoto had run, leaving the doll and her toolbox in the middle of her bedroom floor, Yasuko had turned on her ex-husband. She hadn't been able to help the sobs - "It's because they're dead, she needs help, I told you she was taking it harder than-"

"It has nothing to do with them," he interrupted, struggling to keep his voice down. "She just wanted to see how the doll worked, where the voice came from."

"She took it apart like some kind of - some kind of-"

"She's only curious, there's nothing wrong with her!"

And in a way it made sense, but Yasuko couldn't let it settle. She'd never taken things apart, much less a doll. She'd wanted to mother her dolls, scold them and comfort them. It didn't matter how things worked, just as long as they did.

Once you took something apart, it couldn't work.

Or perhaps she couldn't understand.

"Run on ahead, dear," she said faintly, releasing Naoto's hand. Her granddaughter gave her a cautious look, then trotted ahead on the icy walkway, arms held out for balance.

Between the ages of five and fifteen, she saw her grandmother perhaps seven times.

* * *

He found Naoto outside, at the front of the manor, walking around the ice-locked fountain, the gull at its center flecked with frost. She straightened at his approach, her thin shoulders in her coat squaring, her posture elegant, the turn of her jaw against her throat delicate. He tried to imagine her from the perspective of a stranger. A young child, impeccable and self-possessed and teetering on the edge of eagerness, no older than twelve. Boy or girl? Difficult to say.

"Do you want something, Grampa?" she asked, voice high. He heard the question behind it: _Is there a new case? Are we going somewhere? _

He hadn't come up with an excuse for why he'd searched her out, only that he wanted to gauge her with fresh eyes. For a moment, he also teetered on an edge, then decided to be direct. "I was looking for my copy of _The Long Goodbye_."

"I borrowed it," Naoto said, arching her eyebrow because she knew he already knew.

"Yes, I looked in your room." He hesitated. All the interrogations he'd done, and he couldn't think of a harder one. "I found those books."

Naoto waited, reading his face, so he saw the flicker in her eyes when she realized what he meant. Her shoulders braced, her chin tucking in. "I left them on the desk," she said, challenging. "It's not like I hid them."

"I know," he acknowledged, hands in his pockets. "I just - I wish I'd known you were worried about... it."

"Aren't _you_?" Naoto's voice had taken an edge of late, a harder note than he was used to, and he heard it now. "I know Grandmother says - I know what she's talked to you about."

"Never mind her," he said. And paused, but calmly. "What have you conjectured?" The same as he asked when she was working out a case. He waited while she glanced to the side, her lips pressing together. "Are you gender dysphoric?" And he amended it, because the words were softer than the clinical term: "Do you think of yourself as a boy?"

Something in Naoto's face relaxed - but it wasn't relaxed, he realized as Naoto opened her mouth to speak, and her jaw twitched - and she closed her mouth tight, staring at some point beyond the fountain. He wanted to touch her shoulder, almost pick her up and carry her back inside as if she were still a toddler, which he wouldn't have thought if she hadn't been so distant. Lately, whenever he'd tried to show sympathy for her, she'd lashed back, grown quieter and harder. There were so many questions he couldn't ask. How did she think of herself, what did she think of boys, did she wish she had a woman to look to?

Naoto swallowed, and her voice was thin, brittle. "I think of myself as a detective." She glanced at him, then frowned. "I don't see why... I don't see why it should make a difference. It's not like I can't think, I can do everything I have to do, I'm just as good." She was looking at the ground, the slushy gravel, the filthy snow. She closed her eyes and sighed, then shook her head. "I don't think I'm a boy. It just - would have been so much better if I was."

"Naoto-"

She wheeled from him, paced away, then half turned back, as if she could talk to him but not that close. "I'm not a boy. I'm just smart, and strong, and I can solve cases. And I'm a girl, so there has to be something wrong with me, because I couldn't be like that unless I was messed up." Her foot slid a moment on the gravel as she turned and ran, disappearing among the leafless trees, guarded in their ice.

* * *

"I'm cold," she murmured, wrapping the lab coat more tightly around herself, its folds white and shadowed as snowdrifts. At the far end of the room, Naoto tried not to see her, the way she tucked her cheek against her own shoulder, the lovely slope of her throat into her collarbone. Her slim throat, the voice box with its voice that struggled to sound deep, as though it had broken. As though she could surgically reach in and break it herself, open herself up and rewire everything. Male, female, suitable. Worthwhile.

A smile played on the girl's lips. "Do you remember the snowman we made?" she asked, blinking pale golden eyes. When Naoto didn't answer, she straightened, shoulders squared in an attempt to make herself seem larger. "Don't you?"

Naoto didn't speak.

"I was four," the girl said. "Mommy and Daddy took me out and held my hands because the snow came up to my chest and it was hard for me to walk through it. We made tunnels and angels, and then we made a snowman. Daddy gave it his blue scarf. Every morning, I'd kneel on the window sill to check on it. It took forever to melt."

Naoto looked away. The few threadbare memories of her parents layered in her mind, their faces, faint scraps of voice. There was nothing about a snowman.

"Don't you remember?" the girl asked, balling her hands in her overlong sleeves. "You must remember. _I_ remember, damn you!"

* * *

He wasn't surprised, but he had to think she'd deserved better.

Dojima puffed a fresh cigarette as he strode down the icy sidewalk late that evening. The sun had just set, and there was a light snowfall, individual flakes picked out against the darkness of the pavement and the soft glow of streetlamps.

His steps slowed as he saw the figure standing on the riverbank, black against the frozen river. He recognized Shirogane by her slight stature, the familiar outline of her cap. Unmistakable at this distance was the new silhouette, the curve of breasts under her jacket. Everything else was the same, the trousers, the neatly buttoned shirt, the tie. No more or less skin showing. Even so, when she'd walked into the station that afternoon, every head had turned, eyebrows lifting with surprise and speculation. Shirogane had stood rigidly, making no eye contact, jaw tight, hands hidden in her pockets. She'd tried to speak low as normal, but her voice shook once or twice, climbing in pitch. She lingered long enough to confer with the police chief, all of five minutes, then disappeared.

Dojima had been no better, staring - she was stacked - but he hadn't wanted to stare, because it felt wrong. She was his colleague, and she could have been his daughter. He wouldn't have minded a daughter like her - she was smart, and dedicated, and cocky and a condescending bastard. And he hadn't wanted to look at her that way, because she was only trying to be what she'd always been - a female detective. And though Dojima wanted to think that it didn't matter, not these days, he'd just seen that it did. He wondered if the police chief remembered a thing Shirogane had said to him through the white noise of his surprise.

Maybe it wouldn't always matter. Or maybe it would, because Shirogane had seen it herself. She could rail against the stigmas, hate that women couldn't be seen as capable. But she'd agreed with that bias. Why else had she felt the need to cross-dress except that she couldn't take herself seriously as anything but a man?

Maybe it wouldn't always matter.

He shrugged, blew out the smoke from his cigarette, and moved on. Then paused, because Shirogane was walking up the steps, heading towards him, hands in pockets. Closer, he took her in again. She was beautiful, he could see that, but there was something clumsy and excessive about her with this different shape. Shirogane didn't speak, eyeing him, hard and challenging, before walking past.

"Shirogane," he said, clearing his throat. She half turned, her profile fine and cool, but she didn't look at him. Damn, why'd he spoken? There was nothing to say to this. _Sorry._ Definitely not. _That took guts, coming in like that._ Not much better. _You planning on going back, after today_? Could she step back, go back to the station, go back to taping or binding her chest or whatever it was she did? He didn't know her well enough to guess, or ask.

He cleared his throat. "See you at the station tomorrow."

She hesitated, then nodded, the firm angles of her shoulders melting a degree.


End file.
